How to Promote a Business Online in 10 Basic Steps

Local businesses must learn how to promote a business online in order to attract customers, grow sales and stay profitable.

It is easy to imagine that most businesses will find that local online advertising is both necessary and even quite inexpensive to do.

The hard part is knowing where to begin and how to promote a business online in the easiest and least expensive way.

Large businesses can hire an agency to do it for them or even use in-house marketing talent to get it done.

Smaller businesses may not be able to afford to hire an agency or have a staff with the right expertise.

Fortunately, it is quite easy for a business to get started. Even if a business could hire an outside agency, it might want to start on its own to gain some insights about how it is done.

The following tutorial provides 10 simple steps for any local business owner who wants to learn how to promote a business online.

More local businesses are becoming interested in gaining social media followers to expand their promotional reach.

Step 1: Identify Your Goals

A business may have only one major goal for online advertising while others may have several of them.

Either way, it is important to identify the primary goal and any secondary goals because those goals determine the next steps in building an ad campaign. Potential goals include:

- Store traffic. Most retailers of course look to increase store traffic. One type of campaign that increases store traffic drives the maximum number of visitors from specific zip codes to the retailer’s site to promote an in-store sale.

- Audience growth. Some businesses simply want to increase their overall site traffic. A campaign certainly will boost the visits, but will they come back? One way to get them to come back is by pointing the ads in the online campaign to pages with a signup form for email newsletters.

- Social media followers. A related goal is gaining social media followers with the hope of reaching those followers on a regular basis through social media posts — such as Facebook, Twitter and…